Guest post by Nelu Lazar

THE MEETUP TONIGHT

Just finished a great session at the HUB tonight with Chris Beltran of Passageways and others that haven’t rsvp-ed but showed up, about the many important things to think about, tactics, mistakes to avoid, questions to ask yourself while launching and then while actually running and leading a startup to make it sustainable and successful. A quote that surrounded most of the discussion tonight was: “Being a leader means being a friend.”

STARTUP WEEKEND SCHEDULE

We’ll most likely discuss more and go through some of this in detail during the upcoming Startup Weekend event in Greater Lafayette, scheduled for the weekend of February 10-12, 2012. Here is the entire schedule for the event: http://lafayettech.or… - there are so many great people involved in this event, they are listed in the Speakers, Mentors and Judges sections.

SW BOOK WINNER 1/23

Tonight’s winner (chosen by Chris using Random# for iPhone) of the Startup Weekend book, “How To Take A Company From Concept To Creation In 54 Hours”, was Colin Sandbach. Congratulations!

NEWS AT THE HUB

Over the past week, we completed most of the necessary set up for the co-working area at Lafayettech HUB. There are desks, chairs, there is a library of tech books shaping up, and whiteboards are literally surrounding the whole large room. When you’ll show up here next Monday for the next SW pre-event with Michael Wilson, ask us how to connect to our free wi-fi.

NEXT EVENTS, CONFERENCES AND MEETUPS

We keep track of the essential local entrepreneurship events on our website at lafayettech.org. It’s not only info about our own events, but also of other local groups like SimpleTalk, GLITS, Software Development Cluster etc., so make sure you follow what you’re interested in. On the same topic, we briefly mention that at least two large Midwest tech events are interested in launching their successful model in Greater Lafayette, so keep an eye on our news coming from the hub.

Alright, back to our weekly activities. Looking forward to see more and more of you in just a couple of days at our next meetups engaging local entrepreneurs and professionals into building a community of successful tech companies growing up in Greater Lafayette.